Le vendredi 05 octobre 2007 ? 18:56 +0300, Marius Vollmer a ?crit : > "ext James Sparenberg" <james at linuxrebel.org> writes: > > > Marius, In reply to the space constraint and upgrade done to the > > entire OS. This was first solved in URPMI for Mandrake around 8.1 > > (Now called Mandriva) and AFAIK it has been ported into the > > dist-upgrade feature for dpkg/apt. > > I don't know what you are referring to excatly, but I too think that > there is no fundamental problem to be solved here. > > Apt doesn't do the trick of splitting the update into pieces so that > you don't need to download all package before unpacking the first one. > I think that in theory it should be possible to only download a > package immediately before it is unpacked and delete the archive file > afterwards again. > > This approach would make the update much less reliable, tho, since a > download failure can interrupt it. Well, <mandriva hat> urpmi supports this, but it is really difficult to implement, mostly on big distributions where package names can change, packages conflicts, etc.. And it become even more difficult when you try to upgrade from two distro releases in the past to the current one. We usually need to implement some heuristic to handle such case and not fallback to "huge transaction which download more than 1GB of packages before starting upgrade". </mandriva hat> I guess it will be easier for Maemo since the device has a small space capacity and less possible packages to install than a desktop distro. -- Fr?d?ric Crozat
